Thursday, September 28, 2017
The Train Whistle Ain't a Coming
After watching a handful of fatal train videos on You Tube, quietly I became enraged. I have been harping on the rail industry for years for good reason. I lived in Cowtown on and off for ten years, and this is where I discovered the Taos Hum. It was not in New Mexico. It was on the horizon in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived in a townhouse in Upper Arlington. In the still of a cold stark winter, I walked onto my back stoop and listened through the small snowflakes. This memory brings a certain peace and nostalgia. I miss living in Cowtown, although it was not easy. Upon moving there to engage the Doctor of Musical Arts program at The Ohio State University, I found it difficult to accommodate the "Ohio Thing." A friend who worked at Edward's Music in Fayettenam knew of what I was talking. Members of his family had made the trek from the South to the Midwest, and they also discovered an "Ohio Thing." It took several years for me to discover what is was. In actuality I didn't figure it out. I acclimated. Columbus is the testing ground for products in America, because it is landlocked and sheltered from things other geographic locations offer as amenities. There are no Great Lakes. There is no ocean. There are few mountains, so the life you live in Cowtown is what you create. As such the population there is more educated in general than the population in the South. That is my view anyway. There are no cotton fields in which to hide. There are no front porches on plantation houses serving ice tea, lemonade, or mint juleps. There is no Beach Music, no O.D., and no shagging. They viewed me as entitled never having paid any dues or earned my keep. I was forced to prove myself all over again, and I did. I worked my way up in their music scene. The most beautiful thing about living in Cowtown, was I was alone. I was five-hundred miles from Fayettenam, and it was glorious! I did not have to entertain the notion of war for over a decade. The so called patriotism of of the host city of Fort Bragg was not necessary. Columbus had no need to court the affections of the United States military. Now back living in 'Nam, your entire life is consumed by their preparation for war. It is not uplifting. It is not inspiring. It is a grueling psychological, emotional, and spiritual battle. I may not win. My life over the years has developed into something more than survival. I have ascended the ladder of "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" and learned how to live an enlightened life. The problem is it is difficult to live an enlightened life, when you are surrounded by a massive military preparing for war. As much as you may try the brutal reality of war is right around the corner. G.I.'s are being trained to kill the enemy. The reason why violence has escalated in Fayetteville, is because this murderous violence creeps into the city's consciousness. There is gang activity supporting a drug need that supplies illicit narcotics to wanting soldiers. Unlike the way local promotions paint Fayetteville, Fayetteville is a violent, predominantly uneducated stomping ground for crime dotted with opportunists preying on once flowing military dollars. The inexplicable irony is million dollar homes are everywhere. These are examples of these opportunists living the Trump dream buying their quality of life. The rest of the city is left in the wake of C-130's strafing our local mall. Those who are taxed, desperate, and needy unconsciously resort to violence to survive. There are homeless people pandering for money when you stop at a red light at an intersection. A few days ago someone was shot twice in the parking lot of a local WalMart in the middle of the afternoon! Violence steadily has increased in Fayetteville since Donald Trump was elected President. No one will say that the exaggerated issue of protesting our national anthem really is a protesting of Donald Trump in our White House. Like most stories the bought and paid for media exacerbates these issues for ratings. The NFL is protesting Donald Trump in the White House. It is sickening to an extent that we, the American people, must view such low brow behavior in the mainstream media. Then again mainstream American media, like television, is a remnant of its former self. While you may be able to invent a company, raise venture capital, and implement it online via the World Wide Web, traditional American institutions must be built with blood, brick and mortar, and faith. We have lost this tradition in America, a Capitalist economy based upon core human values deemed important by Americans. Today the government, insurance companies, Big Pharma, and the medical establishment are brainwashing us with lies. It is not appropriate to view drug commercials on prime time television, but it readily is apparent that Big Pharma is one of the remaining lucrative remnants of American business who will sponsor television. It is bought and paid for from the top down, and those at the top only know how to manipulate hedge funds. They know little about producing television, film, music, or other American products. They are bankers, attorneys, and investors who only want to move money around on paper to make money. Building a dream, a business, and a life, our American Dream, is a shadow which now pales in comparison to the riches of quick internet wealth. In a sense we are being challenged to rebuild Civil Rights. It won't be long before those in control in America will realize you can't exploit the planet and the population forever. God will object. As I stood on my stoop in the dark of night listening, there it was. "The Taos Hum." People were writing about it on the internet, an interminable vibrating sound that was omnipresent in their homes, in their pillows, and in their heads. What possibly could that be? I was hearing it, and it was transient. It took me eight months to discover its source. It took another decade for this molybdenum mine to go bankrupt, and for General Electric to shut down its underground conveyor belt hauling the raw ore to its refinery miles away. It was relatively new technology, low frequency AC drives controlled by a computer. The hum sound comes from the electrical processing needed to to run those drives at a slow speed. It requires power inverters, and these devices have reproduced all over America. The sound I was hearing was coming from diesel electric locomotives equipped with this new technology. Not all of the railroads bought into this new technology. The Norfolk and Southern resisted buying such locomotives. Almost two decades later General Electric has upped its game and with bells and whistles sold the N&S on the once new technology. They offered a rebuilding C40-9Ws, their existing frame, into AC powered units. This meant swapping DC drives for AC traction motors and equipping the loco with an auxiliary electronics cab housing the massive electrical system needed to power the AC motors. There are many You Tube videos documenting this extensive electrical equipment. Now the Taos Hum was mobile freely able to travel anywhere freight movement was required. While this hum sound has decreased in recent years, the other effects of massive, radiating, low-frequency alternating current are rampant, undocumented, and dangerous. The Federal Railroad Administration, like most federal agencies, are bought and paid for by the railroads. The railroads in the last two decades have experienced a resurgence related to this change in technology. They have experienced a resurgence also because of former Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow. He built CSX-T by merging the Chessie System with Seaboard Coastline and investing heavily in AC Traction. Now trains could haul more tonnage more quickly than ever before. The interstate truckers never knew what hit them. This second ascension of the rail industry largely has gone unnoticed. Like many other corporate interests, it exists as a Wall Street ticker symbol intended to be traded to make money. Investors don't care how their money is made. Take all prisoners, and the railroads have. Improprieties are rampant in railroad protocols, and as corporate monopolies they operate with impunity. The rise of the railroads can best be understood by watching fatal train videos on You Tube. In America's frail colloquial infrastructure, massive fright operations transpire with nary a thought for those on the sidelines. In a heinous misrepresentation of corporate policy, rail fatalities are blamed on unsuspecting citizens. The population largely is unaware a behemoth industry is hauling thousands of tons of freight at high speeds through our neighborhoods. What once was a nostalgic slow-moving industry now is the most aggressive, humanly offensive, and dangerous industry on the planet. Mines, plants, and bases do not move. They stay in one place with their dangers contained in strict perimeters meant to be scrutinized by federal agencies who often are paid off to look the other way. At least they are stationary, protected, and isolated. The railroads clandestinely have wormed their way into American lives through an antiquated system which miraculously has yet to destroy an entire city. Natural gas derailments have destroyed many areas, but the railroads are allowed to continue to use sub-standard tank cars for hauling this commodity. Likewise the railroads are not required to raise consciousness about their activity, because this awareness, like many issues in America, would illicit a recalcitrant American response. Why would we want freight trains blasting sixty miles an hour through our cities? The more progressive and enlightened cities discovered the railroads and their increased activity. Grade crossings have been closed for safety reasons. No whistle zones have been created. The pinnacle of proactive action on the invasiveness of freight tail traffic was in Los Angeles, California. Their result was the Alameda Corridor, an uninterrupted trench dug in the city's landscape allowing trains to travel unfettered to the Port of Long Beach. As one can imagine the nostalgia of surfing no longer exists there. If one does watch the train fatality videos on You Tube, what will be seen are unsuspecting Americans living their lives surrounded by a dangerous industry, that has failed to educate the world about its product. They operate on an infrastructure which has been in place since the industrial revolution. Steel and wood tracks, the polar opposite of the satellite-equipped locomotives being tracked by GE, are the infrastructure of an industry which has failed to modernize its track. They are operating on rails decades old, traveling through parks, neighborhoods, and city streets with pedestrians ignorant to the threat a few feet from their paths. My friend Jeff Ray was killed by an Amtrack train traveling sixty miles an hour. As a compassionate, educated, and intelligent musician, I don't think he was looking for death. It beset itself upon him in the worst possible way. The railroads, now Fortune 500 companies, are responsible for their own safety, and that means being forthcoming about their prevalent activity which plagues our evenings with violent, threatening, and dangerous activity cloaked in the sentimentality of a puffing steam locomotive. Call a spade a spade and protest Donald Trump, not America's Star Spangled Banner.